Mastery of a musical instrument has long been considered a significant accomplishment. In addition to the enjoyment of playing music for oneself and others, music education has been recognized to improve skills in other disciplines such as mathematics.
Traditionally, students of a musical instrument have been taught by an experienced musician, usually one on one but in some situations in small groups. The private lesson approach can be very effective but requires a significant monetary investment. Many potential students cannot afford the costs of private music lessons. Even the costs of providing music education in small groups can be prohibitive, and many school districts have stopped offering music classes because of the expense involved.
In addition to the monetary costs, music education, especially the private lesson approach, can require a significant time investment. Children as well as adults have full schedules, and the time required to transport the student to a scheduled music class can be as much a barrier to musical education as the financial costs.
And even if it is possible to meet with regularity for private lessons and pay for these lessons, every hour of lesson is usually accompanied by several hours of practice time outside of the presence of the instructor. During this practice time, it would be desirable for the instrument to automate the training process.
For these and other reasons, many potential music students are not able to obtain their goal of mastering a musical instrument.
A number of attempts have been made to automate the process of musical education. For example, computers have long been integrated with musical keyboards for the purpose of keyboard (piano, organ, harpsichord, synthesizer, etc.) training.
Keyboard training is particularly suited for automation such as by integration with a computer. Traditionally, the musical keyboard is arranged generally horizontally in front of the player, and paper sheet music is placed above the keyboard so that both the keyboard and the sheet music are within the player's line of sight. To automate the training process, the computer screen is simply substituted for the paper sheet music so that both the musical notation, video clips, written instruction, and the like on the computer screen and the keyboard are within the player's line of sight. A student can thus view finger placement while following instructions on the screen.
The automation of musical training also includes arranging small lights on the instrument to indicate the fingering required to play a sequence of chords and/or notes. For example, lights may be placed on the keys of a keyboard. The lights are operated in a sequence dictated by a desired musical piece. The player presses the keys as they are lighted to play the desired musical piece. The use of lights on the instrument works very well in the context of a musical keyboard that is arranged horizontally in front of the player.
The automation of training on non-keyboard instruments is not so straight forward. The present invention relates primarily to musical instruments, such as guitars, bass guitars, upright basses, banjoes, cellos, and the like, that have vibrating strings suspended above a fingerboard. With this type of instrument, the player presses the strings against the fingerboard to shorten the effective length of the string and thus change the note created when the string vibrates. Often, frets are arranged at predetermined locations along the fingerboard to space the string slightly above the fingerboard when fingered. The locations of the frets normally correspond to notes on the musical scale, and the frets space the strings from the fingerboard to reduce any interference by the fingerboard with the vibration of the string.
Many musical instruments employing suspended strings and a fingerboard are played with the fingerboard not directly viewable by the player. For example, a guitar player will arrange the body of the guitar above one thigh with the neck of the guitar extending above the other thigh. When played with proper form, the strings and fingerboard of a guitar are facing away from the player in a generally vertical plane spaced below and to one side of the viewer's eyes. The strings and fingerboard of a guitar are thus usually not wholly viewable by the player.
With this type of instrument, conventional automated training devices as described above do not work well. For example, when a guitar is played with proper form, the strings and fingerboard and the sheet music or computer screen arranged in front of the player are normally not both within the player's line of sight. And since the fingerboard can be completely viewed by the player only with the guitar arranged in an improper playing position, arranging lights on the fingerboard to indicate proper fingering is not conducive to learning proper technique.
The need thus exists for improved systems and methods for learning musical instruments employing strings suspended above fingerboards and in which the fingerboard is not normally within the player's line of site.